Inconceivable

“Nothing to do with me, mate,” I told him. “Didn’t I tell you? I took on a woman co-writer.”

Dear Penny

I’ve just re-read some of the stuff I’ve been writing recently and quite frankly I’m a bit embarrassed. Mawkish, self-pitying drivel. I’m sorry I bored you with it. All that stuff about the “longing within” and “morning sickness for the barren”. Great Christ, three-quarters of the world is starving! How can I be so self- indulgent? All I can say is thank GOD no one will ever, ever read it. Still, it does help to get it all out, even if I do sound like an absolute whinger.

I went for another blood test today as per. That’s about it. Nothing else to tell.

Not long now. My ovaries feel like sacks of potatoes having got about fifty eggs on them apiece.

Dear Sam

I’ve now officially handed in my notice at BBC Radio. It’ll mean going into debt because the advance they’ve given me for my film is nothing like enough to keep us, but it has to be done. I’ve taken so many days off in the last couple of months that they’d even begun to notice at Broadcasting House. Normally, if you don’t push your luck they’ll let you bumble on until you retire but even they have limits so I thought I’d better go before I was pushed.

I dropped in on Charlie Stone’s studio on my last morning, to say goodbye.

“Right, OK, nice one,” he said. “Who are you?”

Which is, I think, a fitting epitaph for my career in youth broadcasting.

I haven’t told Lucy about me chucking my job. How can I? She hasn’t got the faintest idea what I’m up to. Oh well, one lie more or less won’t hurt.

There was a big script conference today prior to commencement of principal photography. It was held at Above The Line in Soho because Ewan didn’t want to schlep all the way out to White City. Therefore George and Trevor and even Nigel had to schlep into town. Interesting, that. It strikes me that Nigel’s not as tough as he’d like to think he is. The BBC are putting up most of the money but Nigel lets the Corporation get treated like junior partners to three haircuts with half a rented floor in Soho.

And why?

Film, that’s why. The whole world is bewitched by film, the inimitable glamour of the silver screen. Or at least the whole of the London media world, which is the whole world as far as we who live in it are concerned. All other narrative art forms have come to be seen as drab and joyless compared to film. Novels, theatre, TV? All right in their way, but in the final analysis boring. Boring and old-fashioned, to be seen as a stepping stone, no more than that, a stepping stone into the only real place to be, the glorious world of film! If a novelist writes a novel the first question his first interviewer will ask is, “Will it be made into a movie?” If an actor gets a part in a ten-million- pound TV mini series they’ll say to their friends, “Of course it’s only telly.” The directors of subsidized art theatres sweat out their time commissioning plays which are as much like movies as four actors and a chair will allow them to be, waiting for that longed-for day when they’ll have amassed enough credibility to get out of theatre and into film. It’s Hollywood, you see. After ninety years we’re all still mesmerized. We still want to get there. Nobody working at the BBC is going to get to Hollywood but somebody from Above The Line might and in Ewan’s case will. Which is why we come to him.

Fortunately for me it was a very positive meeting indeed. Everybody agreed that the current draft of the script is good. Superb, actually, was the word being bandied about. Ewan made it clear that he was very happy.

Taking her cue from Ewan, Petra produced sheaves of faxes and declared that LA and New York are also very happy, that everyone in fact is very happy.

It was an absolute love fest.

Then of course came the inevitable caveat. This is a thing that always happens to writers in script discussions, no matter how enthusiastic those discussions might be. Somebody says “except for”. I’ve done it to hundreds myself; “Everybody is absolutely delighted, except for…”

“The ending,” Nigel said, and they all nodded.

It was a fair call, I had to admit.

“Vis-a-vis the absence thereof,” said Petra putting the unspoken doubt into words.

I knew I would have to stick to my guns. With Lucy and me so close to a conclusion for better or for worse, I just don’t feel that I have it in me yet to decide how my story ends. It turns out that Lucy was right all along. You do need to write from the heart. It does have to come from within, and at the moment I don’t have the heart to decide on the fate of my characters. I don’t know how I’ll feel when the news comes through, so I don’t know how they’ll feel. That doesn’t mean I’m going to make Colin and Rachel’s result the same as Lucy’s and mine. I might but I just don’t know yet.

“It’s only the last page,” I said. “The last few lines, in fact. I’ll hand it in when I said, in a few days.”

“But Sam,” Nigel protested. “Ewan starts filming next week.”

“Well, he doesn’t need to start with the end, does he?” I said, looking at Ewan, who stared into his Aqua Libra in a suitable “I shall pronounce my conclusions in my own time” manner.

“With respect,” Petra said – in fact very nearly snapped – “it’s a bit difficult keeping the American distributors and their money in place when we don’t know how the story comes out.”

“Well, I don’t know how the story comes out,” I protested. “I’m sorry but I don’t.”

Ewan hauled himself from the depths of his futon and reached for an olive.

“Look, it’s my movie, you ken?” he said, which is directors all over for you. I’d written it. Various people were paying for it. Hundreds of people were going to be involved in making it. But it would, of course, be “his” movie, a “Ewan Proclaimer Film”. On another occasion I might have said something (although I doubt it), but it turned out that Ewan was on my side so I let it go.

“As I’ve made clear before,” he continued, “if Sam wants to hold back on the ending then that’s fine. It’s good motivation for the actors and it keeps us all on our toes. They’re playing two people over whom hangs a life or no- life situation. I’m very happy to help them to maintain that ambiguity. Improvisation is the life blood of creative endeavour.”

Well, that shut them up, let me tell you.

There’s a church in Hammersmith next to the flyover which I call “the lonely church”. I call it that because it’s been almost completely cut off by roads from the community it was built to serve. Millions of people see it every year but only at fifty miles an hour. Its spire pokes up beside the flyover as the M4 starts to turn back into the A4. It’s a beautiful church, although you wouldn’t know it until you were about ten feet away from it. I found myself there today. I’d just sort of wandered off after my appointment at the hospital and I must have walked two or three miles because suddenly there I was standing outside the lonely church of Saint Paul’s as I now know it to be called. I’d never seen the bottom two thirds of it before but I knew it by the vast elevated roads that roar and fume around it. I didn’t go in, but I sat in the grounds trying to find the faith to pray. I don’t know whether I managed it. I don’t know what it would feel like to really believe in a prayer, I don’t suppose many people do. I mean, you’d have to be pretty majorly religious. I do know that I concentrated very hard and tried to think why I deserved a child and came up with the answer that I deserved one because it was the thing that I wanted more than anything else on earth. I suppose in a way that was a prayer, whatever that means. A prayer to fate, at any rate. Not long now. A couple of weeks at most and then we’ll know.

George and Trevor took me out to lunch today. We begin shooting tomorrow and they absolutely insisted that I join them for a final conference. I was delighted to. Now that I’m no longer a BBC exec and on a budget to boot I don’t get to dine at Quark quite as regularly as I used to and I thought it would be almost like old times.

They were both already seated when I arrived and looking very serious. George didn’t even bother to stare at the waitress’s backside, which must have been a first for him, and Trevor refrained from commenting on the fact that though he did not require wine himself he had no hesitation whatsoever in encouraging us to imbibe.

All in all, it was not like old times one bit. They got straight to the point.

“Sam,” said George, but I could see that he spoke for both of them. “You’re going to have to tell Lucy about this.”